In Buckhead, when a titan falls, the rest of his kind draw close around, to shield the fallen one from predatory, alien eyes and claws and to succor the stricken family. Or at least that was so in the Buckhead of my father’s time. Nowadays a felled member of the Old Guard would probably be lucky if three people of public consequence know his name. Today’s power brokers are several generations newer and often many shades darker than those of that whirlwind decade, and they tend to meet, lunch and network at places like Morton’s, Mary Mac’s and the Peasant Restaurant chain. Old Atlanta still does not lunch at these spots. Hardly anyone cares that they do not, except, perhaps, a few of them.
And so it was that beginning the next morning, on Christmas Eve, the house on Peachtree Road was filled with the familiar faces and voices that had been the foundation of my entire childhood. From about eleven o’clock on they came, the men and women who had been my parents’ contemporaries and the fathers and mothers of the Pinks and the Jells, and, in smaller numbers, the Pinks and the Jells themselves.
All morning and afternoon Shem Cater answered the door and took hats and topcoats and parked and brought around cars, smiling decorously and wearing a white jacket I had never seen, and Martha, in the kitchen, kept coffee and cookies and little sandwiches and cheese straws coming, and at about four that afternoon, set out the sherry and bourbon and gin decanters on the tea cart in the living room. I don’t know where the food came from, or when they prepared it; I could only think that the black people of Buckhead had as keen a sense of ritual and propriety in these cases as did the white, and probably keener. I know it had not once occurred to me to see to the basting of hams and the stocking of the liquor cabinet, and I did not think that my mother, embroiled as she had been with Ronnie of Rich’s in transforming her bedroom into an African veldt, had done so. My father’s wake—for I thought of it as such, even though he clung on and on to his blipping and blasted life in Piedmont Hospital—was entirely, and most properly, the province of Shem and Martha Cater.
My mother spent the day at the hospital, so I hovered uncomfortably in the living room in a coat and tie and received the stream of visitors. Across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, they would have come bearing cakes and casseroles; on this side, they brought armfuls of forced blooms from greenhouses or great, showy, foilruffed poinsettias, and cards to be laid on the silver tray in the hall rotunda. From somewhere a chaste leather book for addresses had been produced, and sat on the table next to the card tray, and everyone signed their name as matter-of-factly as if it had been a funeral at Patterson’s. I suppose the Buckhead equivalent of the jungle drums had done their work, and all his contemporaries knew that when Sheppard Bondurant had collapsed on the golf course at Brookhaven, he had entered his own covenant with death, even if the fact of it had not yet occurred. Hub Dorsey was one of them. His prognosis would be known. It was, indeed, a death they came to mark.
I kissed the cold, sweet-smelling cheeks of the women, and shook the gray-gloved hands of the men, and looked at all of them with eyes sensitized by fatigue and circumstance. The women seemed to me much the same, pretty and warm and elegant in their furs, smiling and moving easily in this house that they knew, as they did all the other great houses of Buckhead, nearly as well as their own. None of them called me Sheppie, but the nickname was implicit in their hugs and soft “Sweetie, I am so sorry”s. There was not one of them who had not known me from infancy.
But the men were different. I could see and feel it vividly, I suppose because I had not seen many of them in literally years, and my eyes were fresh. These twenty or thirty men, the young fathers I remembered from Little League and high school football games and country club locker rooms and backyard swimming pools and gardens and verandas; these indulgent and paternal men who smiled knowingly when their wives fussed over their sons’ late hours and slipping grades and general hell-raising—they had come into their power, and banded together, and were poised to make their move, and something looked out of their eyes that I had never seen. They were the Club now, and they knew it, and soon the city and the Southeast would know it, and the young princelings who were their sons finally knew it, and knew, consequently, where their own power would one day lie.
All this I could sense as clearly as an animal senses the nearness of water in a dry month, though I could not have articulated it. I could read it in their faces and bearings, and in the manner of their sons, my friends, the Buckhead Boys. I felt as alien from it all, as conspicuously alone and profoundly different, as if I were another species entirely. Something altogether new and heady seemed to crackle in the firelit room, and seep outside into the cold air of the dying year, to reach out and pervade all Atlanta. Ben Cameron, coming in at midafternoon with young Ben behind him, was the newly elected mayor of the city and would take office in the new year, and underneath the grace and courtliness and seeming indolence which had always been his hallmark, I seemed to see and hear and taste the force that would resculpt the city’s skyline and rewrite its future. He was, in that room, fulcrum and focus and funnel of the concentrated power of a generation. When he took my hand I half expected to see sparks fly between our flesh, and feel the bite of him.
Ben did not stay long. He greeted the small crowd in the living room, exchanged Merry Christmases, ducked into the kitchen to speak to Shem and Martha, as he always did, clapped me perfunctorily on the shoulder again and said, “Anything we can do, Shep, of course. Don’t be a stranger.”
I knew that he meant the former. I was not sure about the latter. Ben and I had not spoken at any length since that night the previous June at the Plaza, just before Sarah came home from Paris. I knew that he was furious at me, but he had not betrayed that anger to me in the few brief meetings we had had since, and I wondered if it had abated. On the whole, I thought perhaps it had. Dorothy was as warm as she had ever been, though she did not discuss Sarah and Charlie, and Sarah herself seemed settled into her role as young Buckhead wife and volunteer worker. With his election and the revolutionary plans he and his set had for the city, I thought that Ben Cameron surely had more on his mind than the bumblings of Shep Bondurant. All the same, I caught his eyes on me several times during his visit, and they were as measuring and speculative as if I were a newcomer to the group. I felt obscurely uncomfortable under that sharp gray gaze, like a child or a dog who knows something is expected of it, but not what.
“Come by the house when you have a leg up on things,” he said as he shrugged into his camel hair coat and took his felt hat from Shem. “We need to have a real talk.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, knowing that I probably would not. I could not imagine what we might have, now, to talk about, except Sarah, and I did not think either of us wanted to venture into that closed country. I would go and see Dorothy Cameron, but I would do it during a morning or afternoon when Ben was at work. The week after Christmas, before I left for Haddonfield, would be fine for that. Somehow it was important to me that Dorothy know why I was not staying in Atlanta.
Young Ben lingered behind his father, and stayed in the living room drinking bourbon by the fire until the last visitors had gone home to their Christmas Eve dinners. When I came into the room after seeing the last caller off, he was standing at the drinks tray mixing another, and he lifted it in salute and dipped his narrow head, the dark red hair, cut longer than was in fashion, slipping down over his gray eyes. He retreated to one of the apricot sofas and sank into it and stretched his long legs out before him, crossed at the ankles. He wore a pale blue cashmere sweater over an open-necked white oxford cloth shirt, and gray slacks precisely tailored to his long legs and slender hips, and his narrow dancer’s feet were shod in rich, buffed loafers. Except for the web of thin lines around his eyes and the incipient creepiness on the backs of his hands and his neck, he literally did not look a day older than he had in high school. I knew he had accomplished much, however; he was becoming known for the soaring, gull-winged single-family houses he was building in the wild hills and river bluffs of the city’s northwest suburbs, and was, my mother had told me, the chic young architect of the moment among the new money that was pouring into town.
Ben loved residential architecture, and had so far held out for that, but Snake Cheatham’s father was so taken with his design sense that he had talked Ben into designing one of his suburban branch banks, and the beautiful, winged stone and glass structure caused so much comment that Ben was at work now on preliminary designs for two more. The first had been featured in Architectural Digest, and the calls were beginning to come in now from around the country. He was, my mother said, thinking of leaving the firm and going out on his own, but would make no decision about that until Julia had her baby. Even with his obvious prospects and Ben Senior’s money behind him, Julia was, Mother reported, extremely nervous about Ben’s leaving an established firm to fly solo.
“I understand from Dorothy that they had a real row about it,” Mother had said, with some relish. I suppose that since her own son had little of note that she might boast of, it pleased her when the crown prince of the house of Cameron came a modest cropper in his marriage.
Ben and I sat in companionable silence for a little while, the dying fire snickering behind its screen, the tree beginning to glow in the unlit room. He finished his bourbon and put the glass down on the table beside the sofa.
“I have to get on home,” he said. “Julia’s folks are expecting us for supper. Her stepmother makes oyster stew every Christmas Eve, out of library paste and sheep’s milk, I think. It’s a tradition.” But he made no move to get up.
Then he said, “You’re not going to stay, are you?” and I was so taken by surprise that I said, simply, “No. I’m not.”
“Good boy,” he said, and I looked at him more closely. It seemed to me then that he burned with the same kind of fever-shimmer I had seen on the day of his wedding, and that his gray eyes were so bright with it that if I had not been so close to him I would have mistaken their glitter for tears. But he was not crying.
“How did you know?” I asked. I had not spoken of leaving Atlanta to Dorothy, or to anyone else for that matter.
“Because you’re like me now,” he said, closing his eyes and resting his head against the dull sheen of the brocade. His coppery hair against the apricot, the firelight leaping on both, was beautiful. “You’re different. You walk on the outside. You wear the mark of Cain. There’s nothing for you here.”
“What mark of Cain?” I said, puzzled. Why did he speak of being an outsider, of being different? I could think of few human beings more fitted for the life of Buckhead than Ben Cameron, Junior.
“I don’t know. It sounded good.” He grinned, his eyes still closed. “But I’m right, aren’t I? Whatever there is for you is out there, isn’t it?”
He did not speak of Sarah, never had, but I knew what he meant.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m leaving the first of the year. But please don’t say anything about it. I’m going to have to climb out the window in the dead of night as it is. God, my mother…”
“I know,” he said. “They wrap you around and suck your life and pull you right down to the bottom, don’t they?” Aside from the bitterness of the words, there was something old and dead in his voice that made me sit slightly forward at the same time I shrank back. I hated the sound of it. What was happening here?
“Go soon, Shep. And go fast and far,” he said, the gray eyes still shuttered with thick, coppery lashes. “Zigzag while you run and don’t look back. Bomb the bridge behind you.”
“Ben…” I began, and he grinned and heaved himself upright and rubbed his long, slender fingers through his hair.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just feeling elegiac tonight. I don’t like Christmas, and it makes me nervous to see my friends’ fathers start to die, and the baby’s late and everybody’s jumpy as hell. Christ, I think one minute I can’t stand it until that kid gets here, and then I think I’d just as soon it never did. I don’t mean that, of course, but a baby…it’s so final, Shep. Nothing is ever the same after a baby comes. The…possibilities shrink so.”
“I guess it comes with the territory,” I said lamely. I could not imagine how it would feel to be going home on a Christmas Eve to a wife and a soon-to-be-born, life-changing child.
“That it does,” he said. He laughed. “That it does. Well. This time I’m really out the door. Julia will be fit to be tied. She can’t get out of her chair and into her clothes without help now, and it makes her mean as hell. I’ll have to get home and dress her.”
“How is Julia?” I said automatically. I thought of the small, wiry athlete’s body, and the adoring brown eyes and snub nose and tiny monkey hands of Julia Randolph Cameron. I could not imagine her foundering in a chair, unable to dress herself.
“As big as a beached whale and twice as unaesthetic,” he said, and he was not smiling. “Whoever said that pregnant women are glowing and beautiful sure as hell didn’t know Julia.”
It was such a meanspirited thing to say that I could not reply. I did not even know the voice in which he spoke. In the firelight the planes of his face were sharpened into near-caricature, a jack-o’-lantern’s face. I thought suddenly of his grandmother, old Milliment, and what a terrible tongue she had had. There must be a dominant gene there somewhere. There was nothing in Ben now of his father or his gentle mother, or of Sarah.
At the front door he paused, and suddenly put his arms around me and hugged me hard, and then was gone out into the dusk. Last night’s icy mist was coming down again, and the streetlights beyond the iron fence along Peachtree Road wore opalescent collars. Headlights wore aureoles, and tire tracks left a snail’s nacre on the black asphalt.
“Merry Christmas, Shep,” his voice floated back. “God-speed!” I did not hear a car door slam, and thought he must have left his car around the corner and down Muscogee, at his parents’ house. I wondered if Sarah and Charlie would be there tonight, for the Welsh rarebit that was Dorothy Cameron’s Christmas Eve tradition.
My mother was still at the hospital, and Shem and Martha had said good night and left. They were going to visit ToTo and her husband, Shem had told me earlier in the day; ToTo had married a line mechanic at the Ford plant out in Hapeville, and lived in Forest Park, and had two little girls. I thought of calling Lucy, then realized that I did not know her number in Lithonia, and in any case, she would be having her first family Christmas Eve with Jack and the boys in the old farmhouse. Even Aunt Willa was absent; she had, I knew, gone to Little Lady and Carter’s new brick Georgian in Wyngate, and would be spending Christmas Day with them at Carter’s parents’ great stone pile on Dellwood. The house around me was dark, and I was very much alone.
I went out into the kitchen and fixed a plate of leftover party sandwiches and poured myself a cup of coffee, and retreated into the little sun porch off the living room and put an old Charlie Parker album on the phonograph. I settled, self-consciously, into the big, rump-sprung chair that was my father’s, found it surprisingly comfortable, leaned my head back and let the Bird’s liquid silver skitter over and around me like mercury spilled from a thermometer. I was drifting far away, sitting with Sarah at the Vanguard, when I heard a voice say, “Shep? You asleep?” and looked up. Charlie Gentry stood in the doorway to the living room, his topcoat pearled with droplets, his wood-colored hair plastered to his square skull. The old smile of extraordinary, heartbreaking sweetness curved his mouth.
“I knocked and hollered, and I could hear the music, so I came on in,” he said. “The door was unlocked. I figured you were here; nobody else listens to the Bird.”
“Charlie!” I cried out, sleep washing away constraint so that only the old joy at seeing him prevailed. “God, I’m glad to see you! Come on in. I was sitting here feeling like Little Nell.”
“I thought you probably were. I was just by the hospital and saw your mother, and she said you were here by yourself. I’m on my way over to the…to Dorothy and Ben’s, but I wanted to check in here first. Sarah’s still at the children’s party at the speech school.”
I stood before him, stiffly and awkwardly, love and anger and hurt and the sheer span of years thick in the air between us, and then, as if some common restraint had broken, we both laughed and moved into each other’s arms and hugged.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, into his clean-smelling mouse’s fur. The top of his head came just under my chin. I noticed that his hair was beginning to thin on top, like a tonsure.
“Me, too,” he said. “Asshole though you are.”
I poured us a couple of bourbons and threw another log on the living room fire and we sat in the tree-lit darkness. Outside, full night had fallen, and the mist had thickened until it only missed becoming sleet by a hair. I thought we would probably have ice before morning. The branches that scratched against the windows and the ornate black iron scrolls of the fence gleamed with more than wetness, and the great furnace in the subterranean depths of the basement kicked on, and I heard the carolers from Covenant Presbyterian Church, across the street, begin their traditional Christmas Eve rounds of Buckhead.
“Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king…”
Their voices were thin and silvery in the tender hush of the night. Traffic on Peachtree Road had thinned almost to a trickle.
“This is the first time it’s seemed like Christmas,” I said.
“I know. Tough Christmas for you folks,” Charlie said. “Hub Dorsey says he thinks your dad will pull through, though. That’s good news.”
“No, it isn’t, Charlie,” I said. I had just gotten Charlie back. I was not going to start talking platitudes to him now.
“No, I guess it isn’t, at that,” he said. “As bad as it is for him, it’s going to be worse for you. It’s hard, trying to be the man of the house when nobody’s prepared you for it.”
I thought of Thad Gentry, radiantly maniacal, a permanent fixture at Brawner’s now, and of the hard years when Charlie was trying to put himself through law school, and work, and take care of his mother. Now he was the man of two houses. I wondered if he found it an extra strain. I did not think so, not with Sarah in one of them.
He did not ask me if I would be staying in Atlanta; I was sure he just assumed that I would. We did not, that night, speak much of our personal futures. But Charlie did talk of his present, and with such unfeigned and humble joy that I found myself grinning broadly as he talked. Even though Sarah was the principal component of his happiness, he was so sweetly fitted into his world, so obviously and perfectly a creature of it, that it was impossible not to smile at the sheer rightness of it all, as you would at a woodland creature in total harmony with its environment. In his dark blue suit and polished oxfords he looked years older, as he had on the awful night at the Plaza, but his face, now, was smooth and pink with contentment and enthusiasm. He had put on a few pounds, and I could see that in a few years Charlie would be, instead of a small square man, a small round one. He would, I thought, be the archetypal Jaycee and Rotarian, the one the others all depended on, the one who chaired the less visible and glamorous committees, the one who stayed latest and got in soonest, the one who would forever be secretary-treasurer. I did not think this pejoratively. Charlie was an innocent and a believer, and that kind of goodness is only scorned by small, stupid men. And under the stolid decency and the burgher’s happiness, the fierce, holy passion of the small boy with the new relic still burned.
“Things are going good for you,” I said. It was not a question.
He looked at me shyly, as though the awareness that his happiness had been bought, in large part, with my pain made him ashamed.
“To paraphrase Max Shulman, Charlie, God never told nobody to be stupid,” I said, and he grinned, and I knew that it was exorcism enough.
“So good it scares me sometimes,” he said. “You know, Shep, I never thought I would be any kind of star, and I never even wanted to be. Just a good lawyer and to have a family, and to be able to make Atlanta better in some small way—shit, even I can hear how holy that sounds—but it really was all I ever wanted. But now…I don’t know, something nice is happening at Coke. I can’t explain it, except that…well, some of the higher-ups have kind of noticed me, and are smoothing the way for me, and the word on the top floor is that they’ve got big things planned for me.”
He looked so pleased and embarrassed at the same time that I laughed aloud.
“Wait till they find out you never got your knottying merit badge,” I said. “Who is they? How high is up?”
“Well…Mr. Woodruff.”
“Jesus,” I said sincerely. “You really have caught a comet’s tail.”
It was true. Robert W. Woodruff, longtime chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company and one of the country’s great philanthropists, whose several family foundations had reshaped the city: hospitals, libraries, museums, theaters, university centers, parks, schools of engineering and liberal arts, endowments, public buildings and private charities; disburser of hundreds of millions of dollars to the benefit of Atlanta; fiercely anonymous power behind literally every throne in the metropolitan area, a man whose will was, without its being known, the city’s command—not an insignificant patron for a twenty-five-year-old attorney with a new degree on whose pristine whiteness the ink was barely dry.
“What did you do, catch him in the barn with the bottler’s daughter? Save his setter from a runaway train?” I said.
“I don’t know what I did,” Charlie said. “I’ve been in Legal over there all along. And by no means on the top of the heap, either, and then one day Mac Draper came by and said Mr. Woodruff wondered if I’d join him and a few others in the executive dining room for lunch, and I did—we didn’t even talk business, really; just about Atlanta, and how I feel about it, and what I thought—and a few days after that he calls me in and says he wonders if somewhere down the road apiece I’d consider leaving the company and coming to work for him at one of the foundations.”
“Is that good?” I said. I realized that I honestly did not know, and that a true Buckhead Boy would have. The gulf between me and the city yawned even further.
“Are you kidding? It’s like being pulled out of the orchestra and given the baton. Or it is to me, anyway. It’s not likely to be a job with much pizzazz attached to it, but I think I could do a lot of good there in the long run. For the city, I mean. What I can’t figure out is why me?”
“Why not you?” I said, feeling the old warmth his diffidence had always called out in me. “You’re bound to be a good lawyer, Charlie, or you wouldn’t have finished first in your class. You’ve got terrific prospects. Ben Cameron’s son-in-law ain’t chopped liver. And I don’t know anybody who loves this benighted town like you do. If I had six hundred million dollars you’re just the guy I’d ask to give it away for me. Besides everything else, you’re the most incorruptible guy I know.”
He reddened with pleasure, and actually ducked his head. I laughed again.
“So what’s going on right now?” I asked.
His face lit up. “God, Shep, everything. Just everything. You’re not going to believe this town in ten or fifteen years; I can’t even begin to tell you what’s on the drawing board. Everything’s coming together for Atlanta: Ben as mayor, these men we’ve known all our lives behind him, money and muscle and intellect and passion—and Mr. Woodruff at the nerve center, with his lines out everywhere, like a…like a spider in the center of a gigantic web. Awful analogy, but he’s in touch with literally everything and everybody; nobody makes a move in town without his okay. You’ll never hear about it, but it’s true. The best thing we’ve got going for us—or they’ve got going for them—is that there’s enough money in the power structure to finance the growth. We don’t have to go out of town for it. Lord God, listen to what’s on tap for the next ten years or so: a major league sports stadium and teams to go in it? We can do that at home. No need to go borrowing outside. A new arts center? A rapid transit system, a new freeway system, a new airport? Let us make a few calls. We can work something out. Direct flights to the capitals of Europe, offices and consulates of every major country in the world on Peachtree Street? More new skyscrapers in the next decade than almost any other American city has ever put up in fifty, branch offices of virtually every Fortune 500 company, office parks stretching for hundreds of square miles in the five counties around us, shopping centers in every community in the same radius, apartments and housing? Give us a year or two…”
He paused for breath, his face messianic.
“What about the race thing?” I said to him, as I had said to Ben Cameron during a similar conversation not a year earlier.
His face cooled, and a troubled frown crept between his clear, magnified brown eyes.
“Race is everything, of course,” he said. “The schools have to be desegregated next September by law, and if we can’t cope with that none of this will get off the ground. The city just won’t survive it. But Mr. Woodruff wants them kept open, and so, somehow, they will be.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“Just like that.” He was not smiling.
“You think the schools’ being kept open will be enough? It seems to me that even here, in the very war room of the civil rights movement, there’s not enough integration to fill a gnat’s drawers,” I said. “I don’t notice any black tide creeping out Peachtree Road.”
He frowned, then.
“It’s not all that bad,” he said. “The buses are integrated. Negroes can play on the public golf courses. They can stay at a few hotels and some of the restaurants, and go to the movies most places. They just don’t do those things yet.”
“So when does Martin Luther King join the Capital City Club?” I said. Charlie was not complacent, but his innocence suddenly made me want to poke him a little. How could he live in Atlanta, profess to love it as he did and not see that, essentially, the barriers were still in place, that no load-bearing walls had come tumbling down?
“You’re right, we need to do something about the clubs, and I’m afraid that’s going to be the toughest, though it’s by far the least important,” he said. “But we’ll do it eventually. We’re not stupid. The white leadership is not stupid. Ben Cameron has been meeting unofficially with some of the black leadership at the Commerce Club all during this sit-in business.”
“And what did they have for lunch?” I said. I could not seem to stop baiting him.
“Don’t be an ass, Shep,” he said. “It was after hours, and they met in a back room. As I said, Ben isn’t stupid, and neither are the Negroes. Manhattans and London broil would blow the whole thing out of the water. We’ll work it out because we have to work it out. Because Mr. Woodruff and a few other men like him want very much to work it out. Atlanta has two things going for it that most Southern cities don’t: an established black community with a gracious lot of money behind it, and a politically savvy and wealthy white power structure who are committed to making the race thing work. You watch Ben in the next few years. Hell, you’ll see results sooner than that; Forward Atlanta has already begun, and the six-point program goes into effect about the time he takes office. I’m prouder than hell to be part of it, no matter how small and how far behind the scenes I am. Or will be.”
“And I’m prouder than hell of you,” I said, and meant it. “You’re a good man, Charlie. You deserve everything that’s happening to you. Don’t ever sell yourself short.”
The ormolu clock out in the hall rotunda chimed eight, and he got up to leave. I got his coat off the chair where he’d dropped it, and helped him into it, and walked him to the door.
“Young Ben was here this afternoon,” I said. “I’m not at all easy about him. Something seems to be eating at him. Have you noticed?”
He looked at me, perplexed. “No,” he said. “I thought things were coming up roses for him. The jobs and recognition, and the new baby and all…what could be wrong? You sound like Sarah.”
“What does Sarah think?” I said. I had to consciously form the sound of her name on my mouth, to consciously push it out into the air toward this small, staunch man who was now her husband.
“Just that something is wrong. She can’t put her finger on it, and she has to admit that she has no real reason for thinking so. But she’s mentioned it several times. I know it worries her.”
“It worries me, too,” I said.
“It’s probably just the baby coming,” he said. “It’s a…an extraordinary time. Shep…” and he paused.
“Yeah?” I said.
He turned his face up to mine, and it was absolutely luminous. “I wanted you to know before anybody except Ben and Dorothy. It’s really why I came by. Sarah wanted me to tell you. She’s…we’re going to have a baby. She’s almost three months pregnant. It’s due in June.”
I felt stillness come down over me like a cast net. I thought of Sarah’s thinness, and the circles under her amber eyes, and of her words at the hospital: “I look like twelve miles of bad road…. But it’s temporary.”
“Congratulations, Papa,” I said, and the tears that swam in my eyes, obscuring him for a moment, were for his joy as much as for the great, vast, windy emptiness that was the middle of me.
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t guess I have to tell you that next to Sarah herself, this makes me the happiest man on the face of the earth.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
When the great white door shut behind him, there was a twin to it, an echo, inside me, somewhere in the vicinity of my arid heart.
Somehow we got through that travesty of a Christmas Day, my mother and I. It seemed that half of Buckhead asked us to share their family dinners, but my mother demurred, reluctant, perhaps, to surrender the picturesque pathos of the brave, beautiful wife alone beside her husband’s hospital bed on Christmas, and I was grateful. I don’t think I could have sat making conversation in some gracious dining room or beside an ancestral fire, awash in privileged celebration, while every fiber of my being shrieked to be away and gone. My mother suggested that we go to the Driving Club for midday dinner, but I vetoed that quickly. It was too much my father’s place, too fraught with the flotsam and jetsam of my childhood. I did not want to suffer the courtly sympathies of dignified old black Frost, at the door, or of Chilton, in the bar, or of any of the stewards and waitresses, most of whom had known me by name and temperament since I could toddle. I wanted, from now on out, as few tendrils reaching out from that vanished Atlanta as possible. I wanted to leave here light and free, without the burning red marks of their suckers on my flesh.
So we went to Hart’s on Peachtree Road, that lovely old stone bastion of mediocre food and quintessential Buckheadness, one of the few approved places besides two or three clubs where Old Atlanta dined with regularity. When I was small it had been a private home, and its new owners had wisely left the beautiful, high-ceilinged rooms and the great, arching oaks outside nearly intact, so that you felt, sitting there, that you had entered still another dining room like those you had visited all your life in Buckhead. I think perhaps that accounted for its popularity with my parents’ set. “Oh, we’re not really going out,” they would say to one another. “We’re just running up to Hart’s.” And indeed, the elderly Negro staff knew most of them by name, and would ask after their health and their children, and so the sense of being among their own prevailed there. I think that perhaps the most virulently regarded consequence of the civil rights movement, among old Buckhead, was when its proprietors closed Hart’s rather than allow Negroes to dine there.
My father continued his clawing, imperceptible ascent out of the stroke’s mortal grip, though the paralysis did not improve, and except for his foot, which gained mobility every day, he lay rigid and ruined, turning his furious face back and forth from my mother and me to the window, making no sound. But each day another tube or so was removed, and by the end of that week he was able to swallow some of the viscous mess a nurse spooned into his blasted mouth, though most of it dribbled down his chin. Hub Dorsey thought that once the catheter could be removed, and he was able to swallow medication easily, we might begin to think of taking him out of the hospital. He simply shook his head despairingly when I told him of my mother’s plan to bring my father home and install him upstairs, and said he would talk to her himself. I don’t know whether he did or not. If he did, it was in vain. Mr.Ronnie of Rich’s, wall-eyed with silent reproach at me and trailed by a flying wedge of minions, came with wallpaper and fabric and paints and pillows, and the suite of rooms in the right wing that had been the province of Aunt Willa and Little Lady and, so briefly, little Jamie Bondurant began to be fitted out for an invalid Eastern emperor. I lay low in the summerhouse or the downstairs sun porch, out of the way of his bustling malevolence and the paisleys and velvets and silks and gilt that streamed up the staircase like the spoils of Cathay. I did not like Mr. Ronnie’s idea of an imperial sickroom any better than I had his safari bedroom. It might have succored a dying Philip of Macedon, but I thought it was likely to hasten my father, whose idea of decorative frivolity was the murkier clan tartans of the Scottish Highlands, right off across the Styx.
My aunt Willa, faced with the loss of both her long-occupied bower and the summerhouse, had no recourse but to accept my mother’s lilting proposal that she make “a darling, private little apartment of your very own” up on the third floor, in the little warren of rooms that had been mine and Lucy’s in early childhood. She was momentarily bested, and knew it, but to her credit, she put a good face on it, and immediately set out to charm the fickle Mr. Ronnie until he was spending most of his time up there with her, happily spreading out his samples and stapling fabric and poufing pillows. My mother seethed at his defection, but said nothing. She knew as well as Willa, as well as Lucy and I before her, that the attic was Coventry, even done up to resemble a seraglio. So it was an impasse. With both women in the house thrumming with subterranean anger and masking it with sweet smiles and drawled pleasantries, I took to burrowing into my father’s hallowed library, where the huge oak doors shut out sight and sound, and beginning to thumb, tentatively, through the files and papers that were the visible hieroglyphics of his business affairs. They made absolutely no sense to me. I had fared far better with my Babylonian antiquities.
I visited a few of the Buckhead Boys and their wives that week, largely because it would have looked odd if I had not, though I did not go to see Charlie and Sarah. And I spent one evening with Lucy and Jack, in the farmhouse at the end of an unspeakable dirt road miles outside Lithonia. I had never been that far east in DeKalb County, and got lost, lurching along black, sodden country roads where the undergrowth leaned so close that I could hear the squeals of its furrows in the hand-rubbed lacquer of my father’s great, wallowing Rolls. When I finally arrived, an hour late, it was to find Lucy flushed and disheveled from the heat of the old gas stove in the vast, dingy kitchen, and the two sallow, thin-faced boys querulous with hunger and their hated “good” clothes, and dinner drying in the oven, and Jack Venable pinched and dry-voiced with exasperation. The house itself was a shambles, sadly in need of paint inside and out and without central heating, so that you dashed from one small, overheated room to another through dark, arctic wastes of plasterboard and canted linoleum. Jack had wanted a “real” farm; he had gotten a bargain in this one.
We ate a horrendously bad chicken fricassee in the large front room that obviously served as Lucy and Jack’s bed-sitting-room, on card tables which had been covered with the exquisite old damask that my mother had given Lucy for a wedding present. My own Georg Jensen crystal candlesticks sat on the grown-ups’ table, and I recognized the rose-sprigged china and the thin goblets as my family’s Royal Doulton and Baccarat “second set,” which had been my paternal grandmother’s and which my mother had never liked. An enormous space heater glowered furiously in front of the closed-off fireplace, and the great bed in the corner, as dark and tall and massive as a Viking ship, was obviously an old piece from Jack’s family. It was covered with a thin, faded chenille spread, but at its bottom a cloudlike peach drift of goose-down comforter lay.
The whole house was a schizophrenic amalgam of spavined, dismal authentic North Georgia country and satiny Buckhead wedding largesse. On the whole, I thought that the stubborn, dreary country was winning the battle. Lucy’s brave bits of china and crystal and damask and silver were poignant to me, instead of stylish and go-to-hell, as she no doubt intended them to be. I wondered how she felt about the reality of her bucolic new kingdom. When I left the room after dinner to go to the bathroom, at the other end of the house, I hurried through what seemed endless wastes of glacial darkness and found, in the dim, stained bathroom, along with a bulbous, claw-footed tub and tall, skinny, rusting old fixtures, another roaring space heater and a Dewar’s scotch carton in which a rangy, suspicious mother cat lay on an old flannel bathrobe and nursed lank, striped kittens. When I reached over to pet her, she spat and hissed expertly.
It was not a good evening. My lateness and the ruined dinner undoubtedly contributed, but the strangeness went deeper than that. The children were, I thought, unusually unattractive even given the trauma of their mother’s defection and their father’s redefection to this much younger interloper. They eyed me and Lucy out of the corners of small, pale eyes, and picked their noses, and pointedly refused to respond to her questions and comments, speaking elaborately and only to their father. They would not even look at me.
Jack himself was silent, eating methodically, nodding and saying “yes” and “no” to direct questions, but little else. He drank gin martinis steadily before dinner, and scotch after, and sat in a great, sagging morris chair beside the space heater and watched television in silence while Lucy served coffee and cognac and made conversation that was so animated it bordered on the febrile. She was drinking a good bit herself, sipping steadily on a never-dwindling glass of orange juice that smote the air around it with vodka, and though she was dressed in black velvet Capri pants and a silk shirt, and wore her graduation pearls around her slender throat, I did not think she looked well. Her creamy, rose-flushed skin was raw around her mouth and on her knuckles, as if she washed only in hard, cold water, and her suede flats were scuffed and slick and stretched on her slender feet. Her heavy, silky blue-black hair had been drawn back into a ponytail as it had when I saw her at the hospital. The ends straggled at her nape, and I felt a sudden surge of anger. Lucy’s regular haircuts at Rich’s were one of the precise, immutable rituals of her life, and her glorious hair was the only one of her splendid physical assets of which she had ever seemed vain. Were they so poor that she had given up haircuts along with nearly every other luxury she had been casually accustomed to? Why did Jack not get her shoes fixed for her, or buy her new ones? Was she so absorbed in the drama and momentum of their work with the movement that she had simply abjured all worldly trappings, or were they now beyond her reach? I hated the way she looked and the way she obviously lived. The house, besides being dilapidated, was not clean. In it, she was like an Arabian mare in a muck-wet draft horses’ barn. If this was the haven Jack Venable had offered her, I wanted to shove it back down his fleshy throat. And why was he so silent and so rude? Had they had a fight, or was this his customary demeanor, now that they were married and she was no longer an elusive flame, but struggled to burn on his hearth?
Despite Lucy’s chatter and gaiety, and her rich laugh and her bawdy gossip, invariably prefaced with her breathy, rushed little “Oh, listen, Gibby,” the evening rolled over and lay lumpen and dead at our feet, and I rose to leave only a couple of hours after I arrived, pleading the freezing wind and the bad roads and the distance back to Peachtree Road. Jack heaved himself reluctantly out of his chair and walked with me and Lucy to the door, and gave me only a perfunctory handshake and a “Come again, Shep. And watch the drive there. You don’t want to knock the bloom off that Rolls.”
I was so angry with him, and his coldness toward Lucy, and the mean-spirited lack of cherishing, that I turned back halfway to the Rolls, meaning to say something light but significant like, “Take care of her, Jack, I’m taking names,” but the words died in my throat. He stood with his arms around her in the dark doorway of the farmhouse, his head bent to hers, and there was such tenderness in the angle of his face, and in his hands on her shoulders, that I felt a lump rise in my throat. Whatever ate at Jack Venable and had caused him to freeze Lucy out tonight, it was not lack of love for her. I navigated the lurching miles back to Atlanta troubled in my soul for my cousin Lucy, but not on that score.
The day after that, Tom Carmichael and Marshall Haynes, my father’s man at the Trust Company, came by to see me. Shem Cater brought them into the library, where I had given up for the morning on the ledgers and statements and files and taken refuge in an old volume of Bulfinch that had been my grandfather Redwine’s. They got right down to business.
“We need to set up a series of meetings, Shep, either here or at my office or down at the bank,” Tom said, and Marshall nodded his sandy, crew-cut head. It was said by my crowd, who undoubtedly got it from their fathers, that he was a wizard with corporate accounts, and very much the young man to watch during the next couple of decades. To me, he looked about thirteen, an anemic thirteen, at that, and I remembered that when my father had first been passed along to him, after old Claude Maddox had retired, that he had been furious at the seeming slight of being handed over to a mere child. But after the first month or two, he had stopped his grumbling, and had after that begun to speak of “Haynes” in the same tone that he did “Carmichael” and “Cheatham” and “Cameron.” Marshall Haynes and I looked at each other with the instinctive dislike of the young, competent hireling for the young, incompetent princeling, and vice versa, and smiled brilliantly. Each of us knew the other had something that he would never have, and that he envied.
“I figure we can get you in shape to operate autonomously in about six weeks,” Haynes began pleasantly, and Tom Carmichael picked it up: “The day-to-day operating procedure is really quite simple; your dad handled it in a couple or three hours each day, and there wasn’t any reason for him to go down to the office everyday, except to have lunch at the Capital City or Commerce Club,” he said. “You know the staff; they’re as fine people as you’ll find for their sort of thing, and your dad trained them the way he wanted them. They can, essentially, carry on day to day by themselves. But you need to be able to function as manager and decision-maker, and between us, Marshall and I can fill you in on assets and portfolios and such, and broad-brush a picture of the structure and legalities of things.”
Marshall Haynes nodded this time, and I thought they resembled nothing so much as a second-rate father-and-son comic routine.
“You’re going to need some brushing up, even if you’ve been familiar with the business all your life,” he said. “Though Tom tells me your field is classics, not real estate. The real estate picture has changed almost entirely since you left for school, and there’s just no telling which way it’s going to take off in the next year or so. Foreign capital, REITs—there are a lot of new wrinkles we can teach you. Better get it out of the way right in the beginning, so you can pick up the reins before too much time has elapsed. Then it’ll be pretty much your show, with us in the wings to back you up, of course. We’ll be there whenever you need us.”
He grinned, an attractive replica of Tom Carmichael’s grin—the official Old Boy grin of the men who were now the Club—and I leaned back and gave the grin back to him and said, perversely, “Sorry, but no dice. I’m glad you came by; it’ll save me a phone call. But I’m not going to be brushing up and picking up reins and running shows. I’m leaving the next week for Vermont to teach classics to fat little rich kids, and what I really need for you guys to do is find me a good business manager who can brush up and pick up and run shows, and find him fast, and turn the whole shooting match over to him. Like tomorrow or the next day. You can do that, Tom, can’t you?” I purposely did not include Marshall Haynes in the question.
They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, and then Tom said, “I can do that, yes. But I’d hate to. Listen, Shep, don’t do anything ill-considered or hasty. I know things haven’t always been…roses and clover with you and your dad, but everything’s changed now. You just can’t up and walk away from this.”
“This isn’t hasty, Tom, and it’s been considered every way it can be,” I said. “And I can indeed just up and walk away from it. In fact, I can run. All this stuff is nothing to me, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
His face was wintry and disapproving. “I’d say it was everything to you, on the face of it,” he said. “Of course, it’s your business.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is. And this is what I choose to do with it. I want you to go ahead and do it for me right away, Tom, or I’ll do it myself, and it will undoubtedly be done wrong if I do. Okay?”
“I…okay,” he said. “All right. I ask only that you think it over for a day or two, talk with your mother—”
“That’s the last thing I’m going to do, and if I hear that you’ve breathed a word of it to her, I’ll have your hide,” I said. I did not know why I was being so hard on him; he was a man of dignity and substance, and had served my father well for a long time. It felt wonderful, though. Marshall Haynes’s eyes on me were watchful and held a glint of grudging respect, and that felt even better.
“Surely you mean to tell her what you’ve told us,” Tom Carmichael said frostily. “You can’t just flit out of here without telling her. Her own holdings are substantial, to say the least—”
“Of course I’ll tell her,” I said. “I may be a classicist, but I’m not an ogre. But I’m not going to tell her until later. Next week, just before I flit out of here, I think. She’s got too much else on her mind now. I don’t want to upset her before I have to.”
Seeing that I could not be swayed, they went away, undoubtedly to the Capital City Club to lick their wounds and plan, over the Catch of the Day and a nice little Chardonnay, how best to circumvent me. They need not have bothered.
I was back in the library the next morning, deep in Bulfinch, when Shem Cater put his head into the door, grinning like a bad imitation of Rochester, and said, “Comp’ny to see you, Mr. Shep,” and Ben Cameron walked into the room behind him.
He stood in a patch of pale midmorning sunlight on the faded old Oriental, hands in the pockets of a beautiful dark blue cashmere topcoat, his ruddy hair like rusted iron in the weak morning light. He was not smiling.
“Morning, Ben,” I said, getting up from the morris chair I had been slumped in. “Sit down. Can I offer you some coffee?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got a thermos in the car. Get your coat and a muffler and gloves, Shep, and come with me, if you’ve got a little time to spare. I want to show you something.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’d rather show you,” he said. “Indulge me if you will. I’ll have you back in a couple of hours. We can get some lunch downtown, or at Brookhaven, if you’d rather. You’re not in the middle of something that can’t wait, are you?” He looked pointedly at the Bulfinch, and I laughed.
“No,” I said. “Nothing that won’t wait. Let me get my stuff.”
When I came back from the summerhouse in my coat and an old Princeton muffler, he was already waiting in the big black Lincoln on the front drive. He was sitting in the backseat, and I was profoundly surprised to see Glenn Pickens sitting at the wheel in a neat, dark suit and tie, gray driving gloves on his hands. The Lincoln’s powerful motor was idling, and Glenn eased it into motion as soon as I closed the door on my side behind me. He, too, was unsmiling, and said nothing beyond his neutral “Good morning, Shep” in response to my greeting. Looking at his impassive yellow face, I found it impossible to believe that not four months before we had shared a night of unease and transcendence at La Carrousel. I did not know he still drove for Ben Cameron; somehow I thought that chore had ended when he had graduated from Morehouse and law school. But then, remembering that it was Ben who had put him through both, I figured that he was probably grateful enough to oblige Ben whenever he could. His greeting was the last time he spoke until nearly the end of the drive.
“Am I being kidnapped?” I asked, accepting a cup of coffee from Ben’s thermos, and grinning as he added a dollop of brandy from a silver flask in his pocket.
“As a matter of fact, you are,” he said. “This is in the nature of a command performance. And there’s a condition. No questions—not until we’ve seen what I have to show you. Agreed?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just keep that brandy coming and you won’t hear a peep out of me.”
He was silent and preoccupied, and I stole an occasional quick glance at the clean, sharp profile I had known all my life and yet did not know, feeling oddly constrained to be bowling down Peachtree Road toward the downtown section beside the mayor-to-be of the city, drinking his brandy and being driven by a life-long acquaintance. I wondered if he did not feel strange himself sometimes, out of context and ambushed by his own life. He hardly spoke as we floated along, the big Lincoln, a new one, eating up the familiar miles into the city’s heart. Once, as we gained Five Points, the epicenter of the business and financial district, he turned to me and said, “You knew that Sarah is pregnant, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Charlie told me Christmas Eve. Is she all right?”
“No,” Ben Cameron said somberly. “She’s not. She looks like hell, and she’s sicker than a dog. Dorothy tells me that’s temporary, but it bothers the hell out of me. Sarah’s never sick.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said lamely. For some reason his tone made me feel as guilty as if I had caused Sarah’s morning nausea.
“You ought to be,” he said. He withdrew again into abstracted silence, whistling soundlessly between his teeth and drumming his fingers on his knee, and I fell silent too, affronted. Whatever his daughter suffered, I was sure my pain was the greater.
Glenn Pickens slid the Lincoln through Five Points and east on Mitchell Street, past the courthouse, the beautiful Art Deco spire of City Hall and the dirty granite and marble pile of the state capitol. In this hiatus between Christmas and the New Year, the streets were nearly bare of traffic, and only a few pedestrians, Negroes mainly, scurried up the long hill beside the capitol building thin coats and jackets pulled close against the icy wind that had come booming in with the long-hidden sun. The dead, brown mats of lawn and bare peach tree saplings around the government buildings looked desolate and forsaken, and the big Christmas tree on the Capitol lawn, beside the statue of Tom Watson, whipped in the gusts from the west. Occasionally, in the wide, clear spaces around the government buildings, the Lincoln rocked softly from side to side in the wind’s unbroken force. I closed my eyes against the glare arrowing off the hood of the Lincoln, and Ben put black sun-glasses on his narrow brown face. With his clear gray eyes shielded, he looked dangerous and foreign, like a Sicilian bandit.
Glenn Pickens turned behind the Capitol onto Capitol Avenue and we slid down into the great, and to me featureless, wasteland to the south and east, where much of Atlanta’s Negro population lived. I had been down into the Southeast before, usually with Shem Cater in the Chrysler, to fetch or return one or another of my family’s servants, but to my blind white eyes, the streets on which the Negroes lived were much like the Negroes themselves: they all looked alike. I looked questioningly at Ben, and he gave me back the look, but he did not speak. Glenn Pickens did not, either. I felt a very faint tremor of uneasiness, like a foreshock to an earthquake that only a bird or an animal might sense. What could there be, in this back landscape, that Ben Cameron wanted to show me?
One by one, we ghosted through the black communities to the south of the city’s heart: Summerhill, Peoplestown, Joyland. The desolation and poverty of these small communities seemed to me as unredeemed as they were uniform; I could not tell where one left off and the other picked up. But Ben knew; he pointed them out by name as we passed through, and in the same conversational tone as he had spoken earlier of Sarah and the weather, talked of their distinct characters, their particularities. Every now and then he’d say, “Am I right, Glenn?” and Glenn Pickens would say, “That’s right, Ben,” or, “Not exactly. That’s Mule Coggins’s poolroom, not Morley’s.” How in the world, I wondered, in the course of his crowded juggernaut life, had Ben Cameron had time to learn the geography and ethnology of these dismal little black habitats in the bowels of the city? Were there, in his quicksilver mind, faces to go with the names? Another man entirely might have been sitting beside me, and I felt shy and stupid and young. In point of fact, I was all those things.
The Negro communities were comprised of warrens of small, narrow streets, many unpaved, with wooden and cinder-block and brick one-and, infrequently, two-story houses crowded so close together that often not even a driveway separated them—which did not seem to matter so much. I saw few automobiles. Most sat squarely on the streets, or sidewalks where such, with only a few feet of dirt or concrete for yard space, these littered with broken toys and bottles and trash. Most of the houses had long since lost their paint and some had lost their windowpanes, and had blind eyes of cardboard or newspaper. Steps up to sagging porches were pilled bricks or cinder blocks, and outhouses leaned crazily in some of the weed-choked backyards. I knew there was city water—I saw fire hydrants, and open sewage stood frozen in gutters—but still the outhouses prevailed. Occasional vacant lots choked with the brown skeletons of kudzu vines broke the monotonous rows of shacks and tenements; I knew that in the summer whole blocks here would wear the virulent, poison green mantles of the kudzu, and would be the better for it. Smoke billowed from many crazed and tumbled chimneys, and I wondered if those houses did not have any other sources of heat. The wind down here, unbroken by any of the tall buildings that shielded the city’s heart, was truly brutal. All of the puddles I saw were solid with dun-colored ice. I saw few people in the residential neighborhoods, but the ones I did see were thin, underdressed children and old women.
Through each neighborhood ran a larger cross street with a shabby grocery store, a drugstore, liquor stores, pawnshops, and a cafeè or two. There were more people here, men mainly, teenaged and young and middle-aged, lounging in and out of stores and cafés, standing in frozen-breathed groups on street corners beneath shattered streetlights, shoulders raised against the cold, prowling eyes following us in the Lincoln as Glenn idled it past. I felt like ducking my head against the dead inexorability of those eyes, but Ben met them squarely and measuringly, and Glenn Pickens lifted a hand occasionally to someone he knew, and received in return a languid salute. I wondered if any of them knew who Ben Cameron was, riding by in the Christmas cold in his great black Lincoln. I had a feeling many of them did.
“Where are all the women?” I said, forgetting that I was not supposed to ask questions. I had not seen a single woman who appeared to be under the age of seventy since we had entered the Southeast.
It was Glenn Pickens who answered me.
“They’re all back where we came from, Shep,” he said, not turning his head. “They’re working in the kitchens in Buckhead.”
My face burned. I should have known that. I had walked into it. Beside me, Ben Cameron smiled, a half-smile.
Once, driving through Summerhill, he gestured toward a nest of streets to the right. More of the miserable little houses, as lunar and unpeopled as the others, huddled there.
“That’s where the new freeway will go through, and where the stadium will go, we hope,” he said. “It’s the best site we’ve got, and the plans are complete for it.”
“Where will those people go?” I said. “The ones who live there?”
He laughed. There was no mirth in it.
“Good question. I’m sure they’d like to know the answer,” he said. “Holy Christ. We can raise eighteen millions for a new stadium, and the housing authority can pledge fifty million to wipe out the slums in a decade, but they can’t seem to relocate a single black family whose home they knock down, or spend a penny on communities like Vine City or Buttermilk Bottom. We’ve got to do better than this. We’ve got to do a lot better.”
“I thought there was some public housing,” I said, despite the fact that I was pretty sure it was not to me that he spoke.
“Oh, God. Four. Exactly four public housing projects since 1936. We’re going to be mighty lucky if we get through this next summer without somebody literally lighting the fires under us.”
Glenn drove us through Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh, where I remembered calling for Amos and Lottie, and then over to Boulevard and up through Chosewood Park and Grant Park, with its prim green middle-class haven of the zoo and cyclorama, and across Memorial Drive and past the oasis of Oakland Cemetery. I took an involuntary deep breath of pure relief, back now on familiar and hallowed ground, and then we were heading east on DeKalb. We skirted the odd, half-familiar little linear enclave of Cabbagetown, which, though desperately poor as the other neighborhoods, was relentlessly all white, and the great, crouching jumble of Fulton Bag and Cotton that brooked over it, and then, just beyond it, Glenn Pickens turned down into another little neighborhood and stopped the Lincoln.
“We’ll walk from here,” Ben said. “Better wrap that scarf your head, and take a gulp of this brandy. We’ve got a ways to go, and the wind’s picking up.”
“Where are we?” I said. I had never been this far east before, never ventured beyond the part of Cabbagetown that I could see from our family plot on its myrtle-shaded hill in Oakland Cemetery. This was literally the back of the moon to me.
“It’s called Pumphouse Hill,” Ben said. “The only water up in here used to be an old public hand pump on the top of that hill yonder. If you wanted to wash or drink or flush or douse your fire, you toted water from that pump.”
“Most people up here still do,” Glenn Pickens said. He had gotten silently out of the car and come up beside us, a covert-gray cloth overcoat pulled up around his ears. “City ran some water up here in the fifties, but not many families can afford it. I don’t think two thirds of the fire hydrants up here have worked for ten years.”
Ben frowned. “That’s the city’s bailiwick, not the citizens’” he said. “There’s no excuse for that. I’m going to get on Dan Roberts’s ass when I get back.”
“We stay on Dan Roberts’s ass,” Glenn said. “To be fair, it’s not all his fault. Kids pound the mains open the minute the crews leave in the summer, to get cool in the spray, and then he’s just got to get a crew back up here and fix them all over again. He does the best he can. He hasn’t got that many crews.”
“Well, I’ll get on his ass anyway, just to set a precedent,” Ben said. “No sense waiting till January second for that.”
We Walked down the first street in Pumphouse Hill. We had not gone three houses in before I began to wonder if I was going to be able to bear this. As wretched as the other neighborhoods had been, Pumphouse Hill made them look nearly palatial in comparison. I had never seen anything like it. The tiny houses were all decades older and in far worse repair than in the other neighborhoods, some without whole roofs, most without one or more windowpanes, all made of unpainted, rotting, green-scummed wood. Virtually no electric lights burned here, though light poles and power lines yawned and drooped, and few of the chimneys had smoke coming from them. In Pumphouse Hill I saw no people, not even the old.
The unpaved street was thick with filth and unspeakable things. I was, for the first time that day, glad of the subfreezing temperatures; the stench would have been unbearable if the excrement that lay clotted in ditches and under windows had not been frozen. At front and side doors, frozen garbage and refuse and piles of frozen, rotted vegetables lay where they had been tossed. I saw several newly dead dogs and cats, not crushed by automobiles, but simply lying stiff and banal and hopeless, as if they had fallen and frozen to death in the night. Once I stumbled, and caught on to Ben Cameron’s arm, and looked down to see what I had steeped on. It was the crushed and frozen carcass of a rat the size of a small fox terrier. I felt the gorge risk, thick and sour, in my throat.
There were no more than six or seven streets in Pumphouse Hill; it occupied an area of perhaps no more than four city blocks. But the human misery and degradation on them was enormous, immense; it filled the world; smote my heart and my tongue to silence. I remembered a letter Sarah had written me last spring, about a trip she had taken to Naples and the literal communities she had seen dug out of the bomb rubble, left when Mark Clark took his troops up Monte Cassino. Pitiful, terrible, heartbreaking burrows dug in rubble, each with a family living in it like some mutant, subterranean species, wild and wretched, she had said. Screaming their hate at whoever passed. Pumphouse Hill reminded me of that letter. We walked up and down each street, only the sound of our footsteps scrunching on the ice-bristles in the red clay, and the whistling wind, and the occasional thin yelp of a dog breaking the radiant, terrible, sun-frozen silence.
Only once did I bring myself to speak.
“Is there anyone down here? Does anybody live here?” I said. I had seen no one, literally, since we started out from the Lincoln. I realized that I had spoken hopefully.
“Oh yeah,” Glenn Pickens said. “Lots of folks live here. They’re all inside in bed.”
“Bed?” I said stupidly. Did he mean they were making love, or sleeping? Ill? What?
“Yeah, bed,” he said. “You’ve heard of bed. It’s where the folks up here go to keep warm, when they can’t pay the electric or gas bill and they can’t find firewood. You can always pile on another dog or young’un.”
Once again I reddened. We walked the rest of the terrible, blasted frozen neighborhood in silence. When we got back to the Lincoln and climbed into it, I was shaking with cold and shock. Under the shock, far down, was a profound anger.
“Why did you take me up there?” I said to Ben Cameron.
He poured brandy into coffee and handed it to me. He looked for a long time into my face, his gray eyes opaque.
“I thought you ought to see it firsthand,” he said. “Your family owns it.”
The wave of revulsion and rage that swept me then knocked me, literally, against the backseat of the car.
“I don’t believe you,” I said through stiff lips, my ears ringing as if someone had fired an elk gun hard by them. “My parents…they couldn’t…they couldn’t possibly know it was like this. They can’t…they wouldn’t…”
“They can, and they do,” Ben said, and I knew that he was telling me the truth. It was as if I had always known, or rather, that the blood and bone of me had known about Pumphouse Hill, even though my brain had not.
“Or your father does, anyway,” Ben Cameron went on. “He has for years, because I’ve been after him that long to clean it up, and so have the others. I can only assume Olivia doesn’t know. I don’t believe she would permit it. Shep, I’ve known your father half my life; his backing made my campaign possible, and I owe him in ways you’ll probably never know about. But I swear I’d have him in court over this if it weren’t for Miss Olivia. I grew up playing with her when we visited in Griffin. Our families have been friends for decades. We’ve led our entire adult lives together. So I really haven’t pushed this, and I’ve persuaded…some of the others…not to, either. Now, though, your dad is out of the picture, and you’re here, and it’s a different ball game. It can’t wait any longer. I’d have given you some time, because I know you’re unfamiliar with your father’s business, and everything’s in an uproar, but we’re out of time now. Glenn says there’s really bad feeling down here, and it’s getting worse, and with things shaping up the way they are around the South between the races, this has got to be remedied and remedied quick. It could go up just anytime. I thought the quickest way to get it started was to show you.”
I said nothing, and then I looked at Glenn Pickens.
“I really didn’t know,” I said.
“I didn’t figure you did, Shep,” he said. His face was closed. “But you do now.”
“I do now,” I said.
We did not speak on the way home, and we did not have lunch downtown or at the club, and the Lincoln had not stopped completely on the half-moon drive at 2500 Peachtree Road before I was out of it and running up the staircase to my mother’s room. I could hear myself shouting in my own ears, a crazy and faraway sound, as though, two blocks over, a madman raved, close to tears. I must have screamed at her for a long time. When I stopped, my voice was so hoarse that I could hardly whisper.
My mother looked up from the hand of solitaire she had laid out on her writing desk; she did not speak, but watched me attentively while I shouted and screamed, there in a pool of honeyed afternoon sunlight.
“It has never been your father’s property,” she said calmly. “It is mine, and always has been. My daddy left it all to me, every bit, and said it would be my…my annuity, and I should just sit and let the money pour in, and never put a penny of my capital into it, and that’s just what I’ve done. Your father would have sunk half our assets into it long ago, but I’ve always remembered what Daddy said, and I would never sign it over to him, or let him pour the money that will soon be yours down that awful rathole. And don’t get haughty with me, my dear son. I don’t have any complaints from my tenants. God knows where they’d find lower rents in the entire city.”
I had to turn my back on her. I thought of the way she had lived all her life, and what the hopeless misery of those silent, invisible wretches in the cold beds of Pumphouse Hill had bought her, and how little of that misery would ever penetrate these creamy white walls, or her creamy white skin. I thought of what it had bought me. I thought of my gentle, patrician grandfather Redwine, and of the trust he had left me, and of what had financed it. My head swam with shame, my ears rang with it, my veins ran with it.
Without turning back to her, I said, “You will let me authorize Tom and Marshall Haynes to get started tomorrow cleaning that place up and getting some decent housing in there, or I will be on a plane out of here before nightfall. I mean it, Mother. As much as it takes, for as long as it takes. Or I’m gone, and before God, I’ll never set foot in this house or look at your face again.”
“Sheppie…”
“Take your pick, Mother,” I said.
We fought it savagely back and forth like two wild animals all that afternoon and into the night, but finally she agreed. I knew she would. For once I was glad of the sickly power over her that she herself had invested me with: that of the sovereign man, he alone able to validate her. I used it efficiently and with a ruthlessness born of horror at her and contempt for myself. Before we retired, she to her restored bedroom and I to the summerhouse, she had agreed to let me redeem, as best I could, Pumphouse Hill. I fell into a hollowed-out sleep thinking that I would call Ben Cameron first thing in the morning and tell him. With any luck, it could be livable by summer.
But it was not a day for luck, or for mercy. In the small hours of that morning, while my mother and I slept our separate sleeps of depletion, an arsonist’s fire howled through Pumphouse Hill, and the fire department, hampered by sixteen-degree temperatures and high winds and inoperable fireplugs, could do little. In the morning some hundred-odd homes were burned to the frozen ground, and eleven people were dead, seven of them children.
Afterward, I heard, the police came to believe that someone who knew that my family owned the property had set the fire and then alerted the newspapers virtually when the first match was struck, because a reporter was on the telephone to my mother almost before the first fire truck screamed into the inferno, and only minutes later a cadre of reporters and photographers was on the doorstep of 2500. I was wakened by a wild-eyed Shem and stumbled, blinded with sleep and still struggling into my bathrobe, up the path to the house and into the foyer, but it was too late. In this, too, mercy had abdicated us entirely.
My mother, bone-white and idiot-faced with terror, stood at bay in her own foyer, her satin and lace robe askew and her black hair wild and witchlike on her shoulders. I was just in time to hear her shriek, “It’s not my property! I don’t know anything about it! I’ve never even seen it! It…my son owns it! I deeded it to him years ago! He’s the one who always looked after it! He’s the one, he’s the one you ought to be talking to….”
Her words, and my photograph, gaping and blank-eyed in the beautiful foyer of the house on Peachtree Road, were on the front page of every newspaper in the state the next morning, and in many out-of-state ones. In the Atlanta Constitution, the headline read: “Fire Destroys Holdings of Buckhead Slum Lord.” And a subhead under it: “Heir to Buckhead fortune called responsible for slum death trap.”
I did not speak to my mother again while she lived.
Ben came again that night, late, and brought a bottle of Wild Turkey with him. I was in the library, where I had been since the reporters and photographers had left in the cold red dawn. I had been there all day. No one had come into the room, not even Shem Cater, who had, without my instructing him, left trays of food at intervals on the console outside the door and rapped softly on it and gone away again. I had not eaten any of it. I did not think many people had come to the house; though I could not hear the front-door bell from the library, I could, through some trick of acoustics, hear tires on the front drive. I had heard them only twice. Buckhead encircles its own when death or sorrow strikes, but when disgrace visits, they circle the wagons and the offender is left naked outside on the howling plain. On this day, I was glad of that.
I had lit the fire that Shem kept laid in the fireplace early that morning, and kept it roaring with wood from the brass chest beside it. But I had not turned on any lights, and when Ben came into the room, he seemed to leap and swell with shadow and firelight. I had not heard his car, and my first thought was that he must have cut diagonally through the woods that linked the back of Muscogee to Peachtree Road. He wore a thick Scandinavian ski sweater under an old down hunting parka and ancient rubber hunting boots from L. L. Bean. The heavy outdoor clothes made him look much younger, more like the Ben Cameron I had always known. I was not surprised to see him. I had, I realized, been sitting in the dark room like a child at the end of its resources, waiting for Ben to come and tell me what to do now. I had not been able to think or feel since my mother’s voice had died away in the foyer.
He sat down on the deep sofa across from my chair and opened the Wild Turkey and poured us both a tumblerful. We drank it silently in the firelight, looking at each other.
“Where is your mother?” he said finally.
“She went up to her room early this morning and locked the door,” I said. My voice was rusty with disuse. “I don’t think anybody has seen her but Hub Dorsey and Tom Carmichael. They’ve both been here. And Martha takes food up. She’d probably see you if you went up.”
His hand dismissed my mother.
“You’ve been in here all day,” he said. “Shem told me. I stopped by the summerhouse, but you weren’t there, and I came on to the back door.”
“It’s better in here,” I said briefly. I was so endlessly and profoundly tired that it was an effort to frame the words. Tired, and disinclined entirely to tell him that I had felt too vulnerable and unguarded in the summerhouse, too open to intrusion and prying eyes and voices and cameras. The big house, at least, was as tight as the fortress my mother and I had turned it into. And too, I was obscurely reluctant to sully my perfect refuge with the poison of this treachery.
“Better stay here in the house for a day or two, just to be on the safe side,” Ben said. “I’ve got some unofficial guards posted out front and back to keep the press and the gawkers away, and with any luck at all—which you haven’t exactly been long on lately—all the hooraw will die down in a few days. I’m going to cut through the woods and come in the back door for a spell for the same reason. I don’t want it to get out that there’s any collusion between us. Besides, it’s kind of fun.”
“Collusion?” I said thickly. I did not understand.
Ben put his drink down and leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees and his slender brown hands dangling loosely. He looked into the blue-spitting fire. Then he began to speak. He talked for quite a long time, while the graying log fell in a shower of red sparks and I tossed a new one on, and it too began to dull into ashen gray.
By the time he was done, he had told me that, in essence, he and the Club were going to let my mother throw me to the wolves. They were all aware of my blamelessness, he said, and were unanimously outraged by her betrayal. I would have the best legal counsel in the South, if matters came to that; several of their own lawyers were at that moment in conference back at the house on Muscogee Avenue, and a direct line to Mr. Woodruff was open and in use. They could with some assurance promise me that though there would likely be an investigation, there would be no grand jury, no more press coverage, and of course, no criminal charges.
But no one was going to come forward and refute my mother’s charges.
I knew that they could do what they promised. Physically, I would be safe. I knew, too, that they would do the rest of it. His grim face told me that. There did not seem anything to say, so I said nothing.
“Do you know why we’re letting you hang, Shep?” he said presently, when I continued to stare out into the star-chipped night and did not respond to him.
“To save my mother, I guess,” I said dully.
“No,” he said. “To save us all. You included. All of us out here in Buckhead. To save Buckhead itself, and the way of life that’s all we know. These are dangerous times, and a false step from any one of us now could lose us that way of life in an eye-blink. Just up in smoke. It almost went last night. It’s going to go soon enough anyway, but if we play things just right, we can hold that day off until you—all of you boys, the next wave, so to speak—are ready to take up the reins, and our families are safely provided for. It can’t get out that one of us right here in Buckhead, one of our women especially, sat by and knowingly permitted this awful thing. I can’t let that happen. This goddamned race thing is just too volatile. Better you, an outsider of sorts, someone who just might have had the excuse of not being on the spot. It’s the worst thing I’ll ever do, letting this fiction go on, and it’s probably the worst thing this city will ever deal you. But I’m going to do it. I’m going to have to save my people. I’m going to have to spare my city the consequences of this. I’m not just going to be saying words next week when I put my hand on that Bible.”
I still did not say anything. He reached over and laid his hand on my hair, and brushed it lightly back from my forehead. I felt warm, weak tears in my throat.
“In every sense but the biological one, you’ve been my son,” he said. “God, I wanted you for a son-in-law, as good a man as Charlie is. But I’ll take you any way I can get you. Nothing’s going to change between us. Not on my part, anyway; I wouldn’t blame you if it did on yours. There’s something I want you to remember, though, and think about. Your day is still to come, Shep. In twenty years or so, when it’s your time, there’ll be an entirely new and different set of folks in power in Atlanta, new people who’ll never have heard of this fire, and couldn’t care less if they had. You’re not going to lose your…place in the sun, not in the long run. But we are asking you to defer it. I’m asking. We’ll be eternally in your debt; the whole city will, though sadly, they’ll never know it. We’ll try to make this up to you, somehow.
“But if you feel you just can’t go along with us, if you really think you have to bring your mother into it…well, I’ll have to let the courts and the press have their way. The stakes are just too high.”
He said nothing more. In a minute or two he got up and padded out of the room on his rubber soles and closed the door softly behind him. He left the Wild Turkey on the table between our chairs.
It was a measure of Ben Cameron’s power and grace that, sitting in my father’s library in the ruins of my life, I saw his point.